If you don't have experience with people prone to emotional dysregulation, it's hard to appreciate how it works, but you don't need to resort to such an artificial scenario like your gun scenario. People with some personality disorders can be triggered by seemingly little things into anger/rage states for 4-6 hours that cannot be resolved by talking them out, but if someone outside the household (i.e., someone who is not their partner or not their kids) shows up unexpectedly, they can often immediately control themselves. But the underlying dynamic doesn't get resolved, and generally won't be without professional tools that go beyond conventional talk therapy, like DBT.

Yup. Having been on the receiving end of it - she literally said afterwards she couldn’t stop herself.

Luckily, she was just stabbing the counter and not me.

My mistake for asking her how she was doing, apparently.

This is something I have been a witness to in my personal life, and you're right-- I don't have the tools to wrap my brain around this. I'm familiar with disabilities. I get that. You're unable to do this thing that other people find easy. But this.... this is a choice. If you can't regulate your emotions, you can't regulate your emotions no matter the context. If you can function just fine at work, but not at home, that's a choice you're making.

Or at least, that's how it looks from the outside.

I get that people who struggle to control their emotions would push back on that analogy, but I'm pretty accustomed to people creating whatever narrative they need to justify their behavior. Somebody acting badly and then making up a justification is something I deal with nearly every day.

It's hard for me to get a better justification than "maybe your 'personality disorder' is just being an asshole" past Occam's razor.

Is there something I could be reading about this to get a better picture? I know I'm coming at it from a general place of mental health, so, you know, that's not the best lens, but I also know I'm not crazy for thinking like this. Just maybe missing a puzzle piece.

I came to a conclusion that people who genuinely can't control themselves due to extremely low impulse control tend to end up in prison.

Those who claim that they "can't control themselves" yet somehow manage to be functional adults are lying - they can control themselves, they just can't be bothered.

This exact thing happened with my partner. Do you know what kinds of personality disorders are prone to this?

To quantify "rare" it seems there are about 1% of the population are psychopaths [0]. A quick search came across a number of refs to that number, but IDK if it is multiple studies, or just one a long time ago that is amplified through time.

[0] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/601609-wh...